Jeremy Johnstone

This week is a mildly complicated travel week for me (or was going to be). With the original flight plan, I would leave Washington, D.C. at 7am on Wednesday and arrive in San Francisco at 9:30am. I would then have to grab my luggage and get from Terminal 3 to Terminal 1 to then board an Alaskan Airlines flight to Portland at 11:20am. Yes, this is extremely mild in the scheme of things, but I hate having to go to baggage claim, walk a long ways, recheck luggage on a different airline, then get re-screened by security in less than 2 hours. Doable, yes, fun, no.

Thinking more about that travel schedule more this weekend, I felt there had to be a better way. The problem is, that is the best route I could come up with because two different parties were paying for my travels (FEMA/DHS on the first part, and Yahoo! on the second part). I decided to call FEMA travel back and see if they were willing to just fly me direct from Dulles to Portland as it would save me a lot of trouble. As it turns out, they have a 5:47pm flight out on Tuesday night which would get me direct to Portland. Not only is this much more convenient (no airline change), it also ended up saving almost $230 on airfare (I will never understand how flights are priced). Add in the savings on rental car and the elimination of a night stay in DC and you come up with almost $500 in savings (hooray tax payers!).

Now for the harder part, this means I would need an extra night in Portland (a city which is already packed with OSCON folks). After extensive digging, I finally found a hotel which had availability and wasn’t in Vancouver/Hillsborough. The new Shilo Inn Rose Garden had a room for all three nights (and is only several blocks away surprisingly enough, would think it would be booked). As it turns out, Yahoo! Corp Travel had a nice discount rate with them (~40%) and my room rate would be only $79.95 a night. This is a $70 a night savings from what I was going to pay before (Holiday Inn), so even with the additional day, Yahoo! is saving money. Then I needed to find a one way flight back to San Francisco, which I did, on United (my preferred airline for mileage purposes) for a meager $182. This again is a savings from before (roundtrip was $330 on Alaskan Airlines), so now Yahoo! is saving about $200 (hooray stock holders!).

So, after spending about an hour digging online and about a half hour on hold for the travel agent, I have ended up saving the government and Yahoo! combined over $700. Needless to say, I feel it was worth my effort and on the positive side, I now get 2 full days at OSCON for recruiting, an extra night to hang out with friends who are there, and about 400 extra frequent flyer miles (not much, but hey, every little bit counts).

I apologize for the extremely late notice, but James Jones (also of Yahoo!) and I will be giving a talk at OSCON in Portland, OR which you might find interesting. Here is the relevant information:

Yahoo! Disaster Response: Being prepared for the next Katrina

After learning from the lessons of Hurricane Katrina last fall, Yahoo! saw a real void in disaster response which it felt sorely needed to be filled. This talk will outline the proposal of what Yahoo! plans to build which already has positive input from the American Red Cross, Department of Homeland Security, and other non-profit groups. We plan to capitalize on and promote existing open-source technologies, like Sahana, and new open data sharing standards to be better prepared for the next disaster. Come get a quick insight into the system and offer your feedback and comments.

Speakers:
James Jones, Technical Yahoo!
Jeremy Johnstone, Technical Yahoo!

Date/Time:
Friday, July 28th, 2006
11:35am - 12:20pm

Location:
OSCON 2006
Oregon Convention Center - room E141
Portland, OR

Please tell everyone you know who would be interested to come!

Update: room information posted

This year I will be speaking at a bit larger of a conference than last year. I was invited to speak at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland at the end of July. Looking at the topics list, it is sure to be a fantastic conference again this year. My talk is entitled “Writing Your Own PHP Extensions: How & Why from A-Z” and has the title would lead you to think, it’s all about PHP Extensions. In this talk I will give a beginners guide to writing PHP extensions explaining reasons for doing so, how to start, and where to go from there. Code examples will be abundant and won’t be your typical “Hello World!” type extensions either, so be ready for useable code which will let you hit the ground running. For updated scheduling information about when the talk will be, look no further than right here. For other great PHP talks, looks right here. As happened last year, look me up during the conference and I will try and hook you up with some free Yahoo! schwag. I look forward to seeing you all there!

The morning started off with everyone meeting downstairs for breakfast. I was utterly amazed with the hotel’s wide selection of things to choose from. I doubt anyone could not find something there to eat and best of all it was free. After finishing up eating, the workshops began at 9am. As there was three all day workshops going on at once, I decided to float between them so I could share a bit on each one. You can find photos from throughout the day here: IPC Sunday Workshops or you can see photos from the entire conference here: IPC Fall Edition 2005.

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Well if you do, come find me at the International PHP Conference - Fall Edition 2005 (http://www.phpconference.com) and I will let you know what you have to do to get some!

Photos of what I brought are here: Yahoo! swag photos